I can’t believe the time is going so quickly. Another day at the screen. Scenes coming thick and fast. How I’ll hold them together is anybody’s guess. Too many ideas. Will they weld nicely or fall apart in my hands? Only time and patience can answer that one. Real life, as it’s called, is quickly acquiring the aura of fiction while fiction seems more real than the other stuff.

Hildegard and the monks have all now arrived at Netley Abbey but what lies in wait…..?

I admire those people who can keep a blog going and write a novel at the same time. I’ve realised I can’t do it. It’s got to be one or the other. I’m still getting the ducks in a row but there’s always one that refuses to come down when called.

Steven King advises:

Write with the door closed. Rewrite with the door open.

Sound advice and I pass it on for your use if needed.

He also said: don’t seek praise from groups. It only feeds your ego. You’ve got to stand aside to let your novel grow.

I can’t better this advice so I’m not feeling too guilty about leaving off for a while until I get a respectable number of words down.

Counting the days like this is really keeping me up to the mark. I couldn’t resist starting yesterday though. It was what I call a mosaic-ing day. Bits of dialogue and stray scenes beg to be written down as they appear, fleshing out (yes, that!) the characters and causing things to happen. It’s a sort of pointillist exercise, creating the scene and who’s there. The alchemist has a name. He’s Hywel. His litle side-kick who may or may not live to see another day is Jankin, a gutter-kid with a lot of potential and no home. He’s wary of Hywel but slowly coming to rely on him. Hywel’s mind is on proto-science, alchemy, and he’ll give a lot to discover the answer to all his questions. But how much will he give? How far will he go?

Hildegard is coming in tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to getting her and the brothers back into the action. When we left her at the end of The Scandal of the Skulls she, the abbot and his two militant monks were just leaving Salisbury to return north to the abbey of Meaux. It’s summer. They’re delighted to be going home. We’ll have to be quick to keep them in sight as their horses are fresh from the stables and raring to go.

Can’t wait to get started but one or two things need to be straightened out before I summon up a new file. For one, I’m not sure I’ve even got my ducks together in one pond, let alone sitting in a row. For two, who is it for? I asked my editor that question, wondering who she was pitching it at, and she smiled and said, people like us. By that I assume she means readers of genre fiction but this always confuses me. Bearing in mind that there are no rules (see yesterday) I suppose it’s not a bad idea to have some vague inkling about the sort of novel you’re writing. What genre is it? Even lit. fic, is a genre these days. This must be crime, yes, because there’s always a body, but if the death isn’t caused by illegal means is it crime then, as such? this is where sub-genres come in – mystery, suspense, thriller, detection, whodunnit and so on. There’s even police procedural which for my own books set in the reign of Richard II, I’d dismissed until recently until I saw that it might have some go in it. Medieval lawmen went about things in as measured, thoughtful and rule-bound way as the police do today. They wrote it all down. They just used different names for what they did and the role they fulfilled.

That aside for now, all I know about The Alchemist at Netley Abbey is that there’s a busy little port down there on the Solent receving shipments from across the Narrow Sea, there’s an alchemist doing his stuff, and there’s a body of a monk with possibly other bodies in the pipe-line, maybe literally. And there’s Hildegard, Hubert and Co conscious of the ever present danger to their beloved young king, Richard II. Oh, and there’s the great Owain Glyn Dwr of course.

Purists scoff at anybody who breaks their rules but I hate being bound by arbitrary nonsense. My real interest, anyway, lies in the long and tragic reign of King Richard II himself and for me his death transcends all others. We shall never know the truth about how he died and it seems blindingly obvious that Henry of Lancaster, usurper Henry IV, gave the order to get rid of his cousin to Swynford, his half-brother, who was constable of Pontefract Castle where Richard was imprisoned, but beyond those facts nothing is certain. There are offical accounts, chronicles purporting to tell the truth written up by Lancaster’s paid men, and stray documents and comments that need explanation, but I want to go into that more fully when Hilegard reaches 1399, the year of regicide. She has another ten years to go yet . Although the forces of darkness are never far away you might ask where is the mystery if we already know how it ends? Well, there’s what you might call collateral damage, beginning with Hangman Blind. Now, in book eight, first off is a corpse called Ranulph. But how and why did he get that way? And what has this to do with the king?

Ah, here’s another duck flying onto the pond. Let’s wait and watch for the others.

I’m at that stage I call the accummulation of random facts. It involves reading, of course, and a lot of lying around half-asleep. I wake up in the middle of the night and scribble sentences in a big A4 hardback notebook. Random scenes begin to emerge. Sometimes they’re no more than a glance between characters. Sometimes snatches of dialogue or descriptions of a place with its particular atmosphere. What I should be doing according to the standard ‘how to write a novel’ course is fleshing out my characters and refining my plot lines. When I taught creative writing a few years ago in London I began with the line: there is one rule for writing a novel , at which every pen became poised, only to say: there are no rules. Philosophically, of course, it’s ambiguous, but you get the point I’m sure.

I’d planned to write chapter one on Monday morning but am being pulled by wild horses towards starting tomorrow. Hildegard is eager to get up and at ’em.

A point worth remembering is that words are not sacrosanct until you make them so.

Meanwhile I read Chaucer writing about his astrolabe yesterday. His son, ‘lytel Lewys,’ must have been a bright spark. At the age of ten he was begging his father to show him how the astrolabe worked and Chaucer, good dad, decided to write it out for him like a little lesson, beginning with a description of what the astrolabe looked like and how it should be held and then going into ever more detail to demonstrate what it could do. Apart from being able to measure the altitude of the stars, movements of the sun, timing of the tides and so forth, it could be used for astrology. Chaucer set his constant fix on Oxford, that hotbed of Lollardry, so-called. The scholars were free enough in King Richard II’s time to follow their researches into the seven liberal arts of which astronomy was one, without danger to themselves – until Arundel decided to hound them out. This led them to a small fenland port on the river Cam where they set up shop again. I believe there’s a unniversity and a science park there to this very day. It was ten years later after usurper Henry IV seized the throne that burning at the stake was introduced into England as punishment for pioneering scientific thought, or indeed, any thought at all.

I really need a stroll round Netlay Abbey to find out exactly where the guest quarters were and how the brothers got down to the quayside to unload their imports. Fat chance though. Car still kaput.

It’s King Richard II’s six hundred and fifty first birthday today. I hope he’s celebrating somewhere in the ether.

It’s also Epiphany but one of those, personally, is somewhat far off today.

This whole blog-and-write entrerprise is already foundering. I usually spend the first few days before starting chapter one by getting into the zone but it seems as if everything is conspiring to drag me back to the world of trivia – fridge breaking down, orders not being delivered, being overcharged in stupid shops, Ten Weeks That Changed England not downloading properly and would-be readers blaming me, and worse, car not working and the RAC who are supposed to help made me waste an hour on the phone yesterday, the only result being that my car still won’t go and their telephone operatives still need further training. How is it possible to write with all this mundane stuff going on? I’ve always seen the need for writers’ retreats but don’t fancy travelling overseas at this time. Why are there so few retreats in England? ( I bleat). There used to be the great St Deiniol’s Library in the Welsh Marches, perfect in every way until it was ‘modernised’ and turned into a ‘hotel with books’ as one of the habitues described it. I don’t want a hotel, with or without books. Couples sitting silently opposite each other at breakfast. Everybody avoiding eye contact. Conversation level zero. It used to be full of erudite fellows with a sharp line in banter. Outside the solitude of the library you had to be on your toes. Sadly that was yesteryear. Where are they now?

Moan, moan, moan.

I’ll never write anything in this frame of mind.

At least Amazon have just rung me re my call for help and a charming woman in the Caribbean sorted out the problem in under ten minutes. Ten Weeks is now completely downloadable and if it’s not on your ebook device a short call will bring help. It’s a free download for Hildegard’s fans on Amazon prime. Great system. Very grateful (the RAC could learn a lot).

On the positive side I’ve at least started reading the Dennis Wheatley for his slant on the occult. Not very relevant but a good read. No wonder he was a best-seller in his day. It’s a bit dated but even so he pitches right into the story on page one with strong characters, cliff-hanger chapters and, 100 pages in, an ever more labyrinthine plot. Not characters mindlessly killing each other but real moral dilemmas, or at least real if you accept the existence of a left-hand path.

After lunch it’s going to be Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe. Read it ages ago but couldn’t make sense of it. This time will try harder.

Am not getting anywhere with the alchemy. Despite wearing my writing clothes for three days and forcing myself not to write anything until Monday I’ve still no idea what the alchemist is even called, let alone what he’s up to. I think he’s Welsh. I can see hlim clearly, tall, boney, with one of those faces that don’t let you know whether they’re laughing at you or with you, and long fingers. Trust him or trust him not? Dunno. His boy too, doomed or not? A sprite, ill-fed but sharp as a sparrow. What the hell has any of this to do with Hildegard? Dunno that either.

I think of taking a quick trip up to town to visit my dear old favourite library in Gordon Square. They always have what I want. Even though they’re an ecclesiastical, non-conformist sort of place I’m sure they’ll have something on alchemy, the beginning of rational scientific investigation, but I’ve just come back from a long train journey and feel like staying in my burrow while the frost lasts. Nothing much online. A dead loss. Why don’t I know any magicians? The novel by Dennis Wheatley arrived late last night from Amazon. It looks prosaic to me. I thought he was supposed to be into all that sort of stuff? It seems to be a boy’s own adventure of the type you’d write if you were a fella and had just done a stint in WWII. Shall start reading it later today in a cafe a few yards from where he actually put the words down.

This blog will never do as a guide on how to write. Well, it’s how I write.

Am off to imbibe some vitamin D as it’s a gloriously sunny day.

Train journeys always open the flood gates to new ideas so maybe I’ll think about that while I walk about. Could go tomorrow.

This is a truly terrible start. It’s nearly ten p.m. and I’ve only just got around to opening up the laptop. The day hasn’t been entirely wasted though. Despite walking into a street lamp and getting a biff on the head which is now the size of a duck egg, and despite the mobile phone suddenly going dark, and despite my hoped-for free download gift of Ten Weeks that Changed England Forever not being put out as free by Amazon (and I’ve only just found out) at least I’ve done some random reading towards the new book.

This isn’t how it should be of course. A well-ordered author would have had their desk cleared of all extraneous stuff, with reference books neatly stacked, the file opened and ready to bear words freighted with infinite wisdom but instead I’ve sorted a few books and magazines into vital, useful, interesting or irrelevant but irresistible while the rest (the truly irrelevant like DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow) have been relegated to the garden bookroom. Now I’m a wreck and it’s still only day 2.

I got a bit side-tracked by something about the Templars in Yorkshire. Obviously it’s before Hildegard’s time and for Book 8 it’s definitely the wrong county but I thought I might as well have a quick look to see if if there was anything useful there and then I was hooked. It’s by Holloway and Colton and written in an engagingly racey style that makes you want to keep on reading. I have to say it’s not always accurate but it’s a good intro for anybody interested in the Templars.

I also read a few pages of what Ian Mortimer says about Henry of Lancaster during the summer of 1388, the period when the Netlay Abbey story is set. I never agree with him about Henry. He scarcely registers the barbaric and sheer malice and cruelty of the usuper king but waxes on about Richard’s so-called vindictiveness without a shred of evidence other than the opinions of his enemies. I cannot gloss over the fact that Lancaster destroyed the Cistercian monastery Strata Florida and its scriptorium which rivalled that of Lindisfarne in the value of its books several centuries earlier. It was a great seat of learning with an international reputation like Valle Crucis but Henry decided he couldn’t trust the monks – who were appalled that he had murdered his cousin, the legitimate and anointed king – so he burned their books, destroyed their monastery and had about 200 monks put to death. This is remembered in Wales but sadly we in England tend to have a blind spot about the Welsh. What the Norman-English kings did to them is perhaps too shaming to contemplate.

This led me onto a wonderful though short book about the life of Owain Glyn Dwr, the great Welsh patriot. A humane and a well-educated man in a time when kights were barely literate he deserves more attention and I shall return to him more fully later. This brief excursion off-road will not be wasted as he’s going to have a walk-on part at Netley Abbey.

Somebody thought I was writing a blog about how to write a novel. Not so! I’m writing about how I’m writing my next novel. Which is probably a lesson in how not to go about the task in the first place.

So this is day 2, roughly speaking. Read a little about alchemy, astrology, astronomy, medieval science and philosophy as grist to the mill. But I think it’s time to lie down now and nurse the egg.

I don’t know whether anybody bothers with blogs that aren’t about cats, food or fashion but I thought it might be interesting to blog about the new novel I’m about to start as a way of tracking what happens when I write. Readers often ask ‘how do you write?’ and I am myself always interested in how other writers go about it but it’s a mysterious process and I’ve always taken it for granted. There’s no right way or wrong way, of course. We all eventually find the way that suits us.

Put simply, I get up, shower while mulling over the story, quickly breakfast, then start. Superficially it’s that straightforward. About five thousand words later I stop. End of story (or at least half a chapter).

Of course there’s more. For instance, I love that feeling right at the beginning, staring at a blank screen with nothing on it and then slowly beginning to find it filling with characters and events. Magic! I love it. There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing. It’s curious how that happens and this will be an attempt to find out how it does – and it’ll shadow the novel I’m working on in another way (see later) which will be about alchemy as well as a lot of other things. Why alchemy? I get bored when faced with the well-worn so I usually choose a theme I know nothing about. (Stained glass in The Law of Angels, palace of the anti-pope in The Butcher of Avignon). I’m not all that interested in a lot of sword-play and spilled guts stuff. I find it superficial. I like my people to have some heart-felt emotions, a strong motivation, a vibrant inner life, loves and hates and a desire to understand themselves, like the real people I know. Apart from that, how I happen to write should reveal itself in what follows.

I have to admit I’m a little bit frightened. Maybe the energy of the novel will disappear by writing it out? Novels need darkness and silence, to lie undisturbed, like seeds underground. Or so I’ve always believed. Surely it’s a bad thing to talk out your story to anybody before you start? Maybe in a general way it’s ok in order to firm up ideas, but not to talk about the characters before you’ve discovered them properly, surely? I’d be devastated if I accidentally killed my baby at birth.

Another thing – this is all going to be random, I see that – some writers, particularly women for some reason, talk about writing a novel as like baking a cake. I’m not really interested in cakes that much myself, but also I find this strangely prosaic. How dull! How domestic! I see it as a much more exciting and magical process. It’s more like delving into a magic pool and finding mysterious life beneath the surface. It’s discovery, revelation, secrets brought to light, frightening, dangerous in the places where it leads, always a walk into the unknown. Nothing domestic about it. But that’s me. As I said before, there’s no right or wrong way to do it. I see I’ve already got a lot of different images here of what it’s like. This is another reason why I’ve never risked writing about writing. Too confusing. Oh well, I’ve started. Maybe I won’t go on with it tomorrow.

Just to clear the ground on this first day, though, I’ll tell you that the next book is number eight in the Hildegard series, and is called The Alchemist at Netley Abbey and to answer another often-asked question, how do you get your ideas, this one came to me last summer when I was asked to read at a Waterstone’s book event and thought: why not write something new for them?

Out of nowhere came a short, quick piece about an alchemist.

That was the first mystery. Why an alchemist? I’m a rational type and don’t believe in ghosts and all that fiddle-faddle but it’s always interested me how and why people dedicate so much time to what we call magic. What do they hope to find?

When I was a teenager I read Aleister Crowley’s tome, ‘Magick,’ and was intrigued by the remorseless detail of his writing and the logic he applied to something that doesn’t exist. Or does it? I was uncertain at the time. What if it was all true? Was he really in touch with strange powers? I dunno. The interesting bit for me is that the medieval alchemists were, as the name suggests, our first chemists – al-chemist – and were open to ideas from the Islamic world where this sort of thing was being studied. So the alchemists were proto-scientists and international scholars. I find that intriguing and heroic. Without them we’d have no science and probably no internet.

So there we have this character, still shady, no name, no face, but a starting point.

This start actually has an earlier one as I suddenly realise. Around the time of that same summer book event I was idly looking at a map to see if there was an abbey Hildegard might have visited after landing at Lepe on the south coast on her way home from Avignon and I came across the name Netley, googled it, found it was Cistercian (good) and on the coast (interesting) and had been a favourite of Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey) and many other writers of that romantic period. It was apparently ivy-covered, swarming with ghosts and very beautiful. I decided to visit. .

To clinch matters, I was interviewed by some publicity people that same week and competely out of the blue (magic?) one of them happenef to mention Netley. What!? I exclaimed, the abbey!!? I’ve just googled something about that place. What’s it like? They told me a bit then said they might run a literary festival there next year (this year now, of course) and what else they said made me really keen to see it.

Everything they told me was true.

It’s cleaned up a bit now but still beautiful and romantic and the ghosts can easily be imagined. Better still was the intriguing coment that nothing had happened there (apart from a death or two) for over three hundred yeaars. Wow! Is that so? No way. Something would definitely happen when Hildegard arrived in the summer of 1388.

So that’s the first little seed of the idea and all I have to do now is find out everything about alchemy (by next week) and why it has any relevance to Netley and Hildegard’s visit.

I do so want to start writing but I know nothing about anything and am going to have to hold back for a few days. I’ll start next Monday morning (still knowing nothing) and see what happens.

Before then I might have a look at one or two related writers apart from the alchemical ones, for the arbitrary reason that my little house is built in the grounds of one of the most famous English novelists to write about the occult. He was a massive best-seller in his day and the locals say he was possessed by the devil. His beautiful manor house was pulled down in the 60’s and the developers saw fit to build a prosaic group of ‘homes’ in his once magnificent rambling gardens. I haven’t read anyting he’s written yet but if Amazon do their stuff I should have some of his novels in my hands by tomorrow morning. I’d like to feel his spirit watching over me but fear that it’s all fantasy. Facts are what I want. I must remember that.

Well, I think that’s all for today, folks. The sun is shining. It’s the beginning of a new year and a great time to set out on a journey into the unknown.

I hope you’ll come with me.

P.S If you follow me @nunsleuth on twitter you’ll find some pictures of Netley as it is today.